20-May-2008 -- From Inverness we headed north along A9 to Golspie. From a Google map printout we saw a road going up left at the end of the village. When the A9 turns left near a pub at the end of the village, you have just passed the side road towards the confluence point.

We drove up that road and parked in a lay by almost exactly on W4. The cp. was 300 - 400 meters down hill in the shallow valley. It involved walking through dense heather down to a barbed wire fence with a handful of sheep and some old stone ruins on the other side, jumping the fence in an area with no barbed wire and walking to the other side of the field where another fence and a small brook stopped us 15 meters from the confluence point. We did not fancy climbing the barbed wire, took our pictures and returned to the car.

A cuckoo and lots of wagtails accompanied our "expedition". Gorse bushes by the roadside scattered a beautiful smell which reminded us of jasmin or coconut. And brooms, lovely yellow framings of the road.

Back in the village of Golspie we heard the story of the First Duke of Sutherland who in the 1770s had cleared the land of small farmers and burnt their houses. And of his wife who had built villages for the farmers instead, all to increase the output of the Duke's sheep farming. When the Iron Curtain in Europe fell and statues of Lenin and others were pulled down in Eastern Europe some locals(?) saw the parallel, and about fifteen years ago they tried to blow up the monument of the Duke on top of the Ben Bhraggie, the mountain overlooking the village, just leaving some scars on the pillar.....